Abstract
The use of optimization techniques is well established in forest short-term planning and decision-making. Yet, existing techniques may pose some limitations for tackling with stochastic factors impacting in the execution of forest operations, such as delays, equipment breakdowns and other unexpected events. This paper explores the potential of using optimization techniques in combination with discrete-event simulation (DES) models for planning harvesting and logistics operations acknowledging uncertainty. DES models may be useful for assessing the performance and identifying bottlenecks associated with the execution of the deterministic plans retrieved with optimization techniques, when such stochastic events occur. This paper further presents an approach for the combination of a heuristic and a DES model developed in SIMIO. This approach was used to solve the raw material reception problem (RMRP) at a Portuguese pulp mill. This paper concludes with the analysis of the performance of deterministic schedules for the wood trucks considering uncertainty in their arrival at the mill.

Abstract
In most real multi-robot applications, such as search-and-rescue, cooperative robots have to move to complete their tasks while maintaining communication among themselves without the aid of a communication infrastructure. However, initially deploying and ensuring a mobile ad-hoc network in real and complex environments is an arduous task since the strength of the connection between two nodes (i.e., robots) can change rapidly in time or even disappear. An extension of the Particle Swarm Optimization to multi-robot applications has been previously proposed and denoted as Robotic Darwinian PSO (RDPSO). This paper contributes with a further extension of the RDPSO, thus integrating two research aspects: (i) an autonomous, realistic and fault-tolerant initial deployment strategy denoted as Extended Spiral of Theodorus (EST); and (ii) a fault-tolerant distributed search to prevent communication network splits. The exploring agents, denoted as scouts, are autonomously deployed using supporting agents, denoted as rangers. Experimental results with 15 physical scouts and 3 physical rangers show that the algorithm converges to the optimal solution faster and more accurately using the EST approach over the random deployment strategy. Also, a more fault-tolerant strategy clearly influences the time needed to converge to the final solution, but is less susceptible to robot failures.

Abstract

Abstract
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the world's most prevalent medical conditions. Contemporary management focuses on lowering mean blood glucose values toward a normal range, but largely ignores the dynamics of glucose fluctuations. We probed analyte time series obtained from continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensors. We show that the fluctuations in CGM values sampled every 5 min are not uncorrelated noise. Next, using multiscale entropy analysis, we quantified the complexity of the temporal structure of the CGM time series from a group of elderly subjects with type 2 DM and age-matched controls. We further probed the structure of these CGM time series using detrended fluctuation analysis. Our findings indicate that the dynamics of glucose fluctuations from control subjects are more complex than those of subjects with type 2 DM over time scales ranging from about 5 min to 5 h. These findings support consideration of a new framework, dynamical glucometry, to guide mechanistic research and to help assess and compare therapeutic interventions, which should enhance complexity of glucose fluctuations and not just lower mean and variance of blood glucose levels. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.

Abstract

Abstract
In the last decade, SAR interferometry techniques, especially those that use time series analysis experienced a strong development in both, methodologies and applications, becoming an operational tool for deformation monitoring. The emergence of a growing number of SAR dedicated missions combined with the increasing interest from academics, but also private research groups, reflected in the number of available software packages developed with interferometric analysis purposes, were the major responsible for the InSAR/MTI achievements occurred over the past few years. Many free-of-charge (freeware or open-source) and commercial software packages exist. Due to its proven reliability and freeware distribution among the scientific community, Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers/Multi-Temporal Interferometry (StaMPS/MTI) implementation, is widely used for ground deformation monitoring. This paper presents viStaMPS v1.2, a collaborative scientific project that appeared with three major purposes: (1) facilitate the usage by users nonfamiliar with the specificities of the programming language that supports StaMPS; (2) implement several visualization tasks not available in the StaMPS standard approach requiring that each user to develop its own code for visualization and interpretation purposes and (3) create a collaborative research project, continually under development counting on the dynamism of its users to improve and/or add new features. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.